YOUR VIEW: Trump has become role model for despots around world

Sunday

Feb 18, 2018 at 3:01 AM

In the Era of Donald J. Trump — however short-lived it might be — the potential consequences of language and its context spewing from his bully pulpit matter.

Already we are seeing the scourge of Trump’s “fake news” mantra proliferating in the playbooks of dictators across the globe, including the infamous Syrian tyrant, Bashar Al Assad, who has complained about the “fake news” surrounding his oppressive regime that among other heinous crimes, has unleashed chemical weapons on it own people.

Americans have been bombarded by the potboiler “fake news” for more than two years or ever since Trump decided to pursue the nation’s highest elected office. In Trumpian jargon the meaning of “fake news” is an epithet aimed at factual or truthful reportage by media outlets who have covered his chaotic campaign and presidency. To Trump and his ardent supporters in the Oval Office, Congress and his lap dog news outlet, Fox and Friends, “fake news” is merely any statement or report, no matter how well-sourced, that disagrees with what Trump and his administration say or do.

Increasingly, however, the Trump Presidency has been under siege because of legal entanglements via the Russian probe over allegations of financial wrongdoing and conspiracy with Vladimir Putin. Another zeppelin sized controversy is whether or not Trump and his minions might have committed obstruction of justice, related to the ongoing investigation of both. With each new revelation, Trump’s response is invariably, that it’s “fake news.”

And this president is not the first. In the Richard M. Nixon Presidency (1969-1974,) his quasi — “fake news” hackney was that the “liberal, East Coast, media establishment “was slanted against him and not to be trusted. This in the face of a daily onslaught of revelations, relating to the burgeoning Watergate Affair that Nixon was attempting to stymie and that eventually destroyed his administration.

Are there similarities between the Nixonian and Trumpian attacks on the First Amendment? Is it a foregone conclusions that, like Nixon, Trump has a potential “smoking gun” that he’s trying desperately to conceal?

Those answers are currently moot until Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe is completed, but Americans need to be vigilant about Trump’s contextual language.

Latest exemplar, Trump’s insistence that the dissidents in the Democratic Party who failed to applaud during the State of the Union Address were “treasonous.” Later, the POTUS said it was a comment of sarcasm. Supporters downplayed the “treasonous” comment as Trump being Trump. However, the longer view of Trump’s insidious strategy is to rally his hard core base of support with rhetoric that hammers at any and all dissent, that anything that unflinchingly fails to support Trump or his policies directly is un-American.

Journalist/Political Commentator, John Avlon warned during a segment of CNN analysis of the Trump “treasonous” comment that, “the president so casually using these phrases is a radical departure from past traditions and we can not get numbed into forgetting that … Words have meanings … Treason is the most serious civic sin there is and it is a crime … To say the Democrats, the political opposition is treasonous for not applauding during the State of the Union is… Un American in itself…”

Actual treason is defined in the U.S. Constitution as “levying war against (the United States) or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act.”

An English poet, Sir John Harrington, wrote that “treason doth never prosper … what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

It is an earlier more dignified version, of the old saw that “to the victor goes the spoils, that, indeed, the winners write history which emerged from the election of the first strictly partisan American President, Andrew Jackson, who had supporters, literally, climbing through the windows of the White House for political patronage jobs.

Trump, intuitively, believes he is entitled to the spoils of office, blind fealty by and dominion over all Americans, even the moral and legal authority to define treason itself. If he is successful in such an unprecedented endeavor, then the rule of law and accountability of every citizen — the very essence of American democracy — will cease to exist and the concept will gather dust in our country’s archives.

Bruce C. Ditata lives in Wareham.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.